by  Michael O’Neill

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have sacked tens of thousands of federal civil servants in their effort to destroy-by-privatising the federal government, which will destroy American democracy. They believe it will be to the benefit of themselves and their fellow plutocrats. It’s crazy time in crazy town!

At the end of the first one hundred days of this presidential term, Trump and Musk will succeed in ‘flooding the zone’ with their illegal attacks on federal buildings and workers if the federal courts do not speed up their response. They began with USAID, the international development agency, before the courts could stop them. The focus on the first one hundred days’ began in 1932 with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who rescued America and the world from the Great Depression. What a contrast with Trump.

The lower federal courts have begun to rule against Trump, but he and his flunkies have so far rejected their decisions. The exception was the seven to two Supreme Court decision, in the early morning of Saturday, 19 April, to stop the deportation by plane, and subsequent disappearance, of unknown prisoners of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to the notorious El Salvador CICOT prison, without any due process of law.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had scrambled to respond to information they received that a bus escorted by law enforcement vehicles had just been spotted leaving a prison for immigrants in Texas and was going in the direction of an airport outside Abilene. They managed to get a court order to turn the bus around and take the immigrants back to the Texas prison.

 Michael L. O’Neill was a public defender.